CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/25/secret_cia_files_prove_america_helped_saddam_as_he_gassed_iran?page=0,0

by w1ntermute • 13 years ago

153 90 13 years ago

foreignpolicy.com

jlgreco5• 13 years ago

Honestly this has never really been a secret, but it is good to see this get some proper attention. With any luck Americans will be more wary of statements like Bush's infamous "'Why do they hate us?' ... They hate our freedom".

anologwintermut2• 13 years ago

While the "they hate our freedom" is a completely bullshit line, in the case of Al Qaeda who Bush was referring to, they probably would have supported primarily Sunni Iraq gassing primarily Shia Iran.

Our policies in Egypt and (ironically) putting troops in Saudi Arabia to fight Saddam, on the other hand, did motivate Al Qaeda.

jlgreco5• 13 years ago

Hmm, I thought the "they hate our freedom" line was from the "Axis of Evil" speech. Looks like I remembered wrong.

throwaway_yy2Di• 13 years ago

"U.S. says Iraq used nerve gas against Iran" -- March 30, 1984

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=cOEbAAAAIBAJ&pg=3398,80...

"Iraq May Get U.S. Aid To Prevent Iran Victory" -- May 21, 1984

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=xcQ_AAAAIBAJ&pg=2897,26...

Not much of a secret indeed.

GauntletWizard• 13 years ago

One of the primary tenets of Al Qaeda is to impose Sharia law on the land. They believe that "man-made" laws are unnatural, and go against god's will; They would see the entirety of the world under their strict, revisionist, regressive, incredibly broken system of law. They literally do "hate our freedom". Every time I hear someone repeat that line as a joke, it makes me mad how incredibly out of touch they are. Literally; Al Qaeda, and an substantial proportion of all muslims everywhere, not only hate your freedom, but would kill you just for espousing it.

eliasmacpherson• 13 years ago

I'd like to see some numbers there, opinion polls to back up your utter nonsense.

aaronbrethorst3• 13 years ago

Ah, it's you again. Do you actually know any Muslims? I've never met one who "hated [my] freedom."

nwp90• 13 years ago

"Literally; Al Qaeda, and an substantial proportion of all muslims everywhere"

Non-sequitur. No matter how true it may be for Al Qaeda, for which people may feel they have seen evidence, you provide absolutely no backing for your assertion that a "substantial proportion of all muslims everywhere" agree with what you assert Al Qaeda feel.

devx• 13 years ago

Anyone else think they're doing the same now with the "gas attack" in Syria? I don't really claim to understand how a dictator thinks under pressure of civil war, but the guy seemed relatively intelligent and educated. He'd probably know better than to do such an attack, when US and others were looking for any excuse to enter the war.

The situation really is terrible for everyone there, but I'm not sure an US intervention would make things better, and I especially don't trust US propaganda anymore. I'm way over the "spreading democracy" phase.

jlgreco5• 13 years ago

At this point, there isn't any way to say for sure. The only thing about that situation that seems clear is that the situation is a clusterfuck and that nothing is clear.

We should want nothing to do with that situation and indeed it seems most Americans don't want anything to do with that situation (http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/25/us-syria-crisis-us...). Unfortunately the possibility remains that Americans already do have something to do with the situation, whether that is what the people desire or not.

speeder2• 13 years ago

Although even accident cannot be ruled out (the situation is just confusing and crazy), it would not surprise me if the attack was backed (even if indirectly) by US or Israel. It would surprise me even less if it was someone else, and US knew and did nothing to prevent it on purpose (like the story on the article, or the one about OWS people being targeted by snipers and FBI ignoring the snipers on purpose).

rdtsc• 13 years ago

Still hard to say. Objectively, given that neither side actually cares for taking innocent human lives, the ones most likely to profit from this are the rebels. Obama's "line in the sand" speech coupled with the timing of UN inspectors on the ground should make one think twice before jumping to default conclusion. I don't care for one side or the other, it is just a big mess anyway it seems. The reason I kind of follow is that I am afraid somehow US is going to get involved in it, which, now seems more likely.

znowi• 13 years ago

The situation really is terrible for everyone there, but I'm not sure an US intervention would make things better

The havoc that unfolds in the Middle East is the US intervention. Instability in the region fuels the War on Terror.

There's little concern for the locals who are mere pawns in the US game. Afghans and Iraqis already know that. Others, like Egyptians, are starting to realize this.

grecy• 13 years ago

Are people honestly still proud to be American when things like this come to light?

Why would you want to continue to live in a country that seems to make things like this routine? (honest question, I don't understand)

jlgreco5• 13 years ago

Why would you want to continue to live in a country that seems to make things like this routine?

Honest answer to the honest question: I want to live in this country[1] because I consider it my home. The government? That is the part I don't care for. I feel absolutely no loyalty to it. When another victor inevitably starts writing history books, those books will not be kind to the modern American government.

[1] Where "country" is both a chunk of geography, a loose-knit culture (perhaps best described as a culture of loose-knit cultures), and the place where most of the individual people I like also live.

ekianjo5• 13 years ago

I feel absolutely no loyalty to it.

Yet you are enforced to be loyal to it. Try not paying your taxes, for example, and they will deprive you of your freedom.

rdl2• 13 years ago

I think history will probably say the US became potentially powerful due to geography (resources and relative safety in the 1800s), as well as technological innovation and relative stability and freedom for a couple hundred years. But then, that WW2 and the Cold War led to becoming an empire, and that once the empire lost a (fairly real, if pointless) external enemy, it started casting about for enemies, and found two: external "terrorists" and any kind of uncertainty or decentralization (i.e. domestic freedom).

I'd prefer an American empire to a global caliphate, but that's not really the a likely decision. What is likely is a hegemonic US empire vs. some kind of decentralized system with autonomy and freedom at different levels (individuals retaining a lot, local governments and companies having some, provinces some, nation-states other, regions other, and global some). That would be a pretty clear choice, and I don't think you can say opposing a US empire is opposing the US overall.

hydralist• 13 years ago

</freedom>?

mikegagnon• 13 years ago

Are people honestly still proud to be American when things like this come to light?

Humans have an amazing capacity to hold contradictory views.

Why would you want to continue to live in a country that seems to make things like this routine? (honest question, I don't understand)

If you disown your government, you relinquish any hope of fixing it through democracy.

short_circut• 13 years ago

I frequently ask myself that same question. I wish I had an answer for you. I could attempt to answer it but the NSA would probably put me on a no fly list or something as a limited form of extrajudicial punishment. Or maybe I am paranoid. But then again given all the things I have learned about what the US has done how can I not be?

keerthiko• 13 years ago

Everytime I'm reminded a country like this just spurned me an honestly-applied-for work visa, it brings the taste of sour grapes back up my throat, now that I'm leaving in a few months. It's unfortunate that as others mentioned, many of the individual people I like call this country home. I hope someday to be able to convince them to up their roots and come hang out with me in Canada or Sweden or some cooler place.

crazygringo• 13 years ago

You can feel proud to be part of the American people, the American nation, and proud of certain long-standing American values.

At you can, at the same time, be completely critical of certain aspects of US domestic and foreign policy -- and even certain aspects of US culture.

dfc5• 13 years ago

I find this to be a strange sentiment and it certainly makes for strange bed fellows. The "love it or leave it" line was also a common refrain from the John Birch crowd and other reactionary groups during the 60s.

I think the US is a better place because of people like Mary Harris Jones and Joe Hill or Dr. King and Rep. Lewis. If they (and countless others) had adopted your philosophy things would be much worse for people living in the US who lacked the financial mobility to emigrate to another country.[1] If you think the US is on the wrong path now imagine how much worse the situation would be if the only people left were individuals who supported all of the policies and programs you find so heinous.

Can you imagine how much worse life would be for some people in South Africa if Nelson Mandela said "screw it, I am out of here"?

[1] I did not want to belabor the point anymore but suffice it to say I think there is a serious "class/privilege problem" with this philosophy.

rooshdi• 13 years ago

Never got it either. Always reeked of a power trip.

PavlovsCat• 13 years ago

"Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception." -- George Owell ( http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/essays/notes-on-nationalism... )

adventured• 13 years ago

First, I would ask what your home country is, so that we can dig into its history.

Second, if you had extrapolated out your premise, you'd quickly come to the conclusion that almost nobody could continue to live in their countries. See: Germany, Britain, Italy, Russia, France, Spain, Japan, China, and on it goes. There isn't a single major country on earth without a sordid history. Whether we're talking various European states that massively supported the slave trade or used military expeditions to conquer territory, or the Communist era in Russia or the Fascism era under Putin, or the tens of millions Mao murdered through famine and gulags, well, you get the point.

Third, America has 300 million people. What do you think they're all going to do exactly, immigrate to Canada? If they did that, Canada would become America. It's about the culture of the people: the American people elected this mess, and continue to allow it to happen / support it.

Overall your questions don't really make any sense. Your intent seems to be nothing more than to drive guilt and passive aggressively bash the US. What's the point of that on HN?

whiddershins• 13 years ago

What country is so great that they can say their government never engages is things like this, even though they have the capacity to?

saraid2165• 13 years ago

Why would you want to continue to live in a country that seems to make things like this routine?

Because I know it best. If I'm going to contribute to fixing a system, it's going to be this one.

speeder2• 13 years ago

Then US citizens wonder why everyone else hates them.

Much of this, is not news in many countries, although it lacks solid proof or confessions, it is impossible to keep all that hidden for long.

Brazillians for example figured only one or two years after the US backed coup here, that the coup was US backed. (declassified documents confirmed our suspicions about 5 years ago).

Also, there still many people here waiting to see if documents detailing how our ships got sunk during World War II, the official history is that it was the germans and this is why we joined the war, but WWII veterans swear it was US posing as germans, so they could close the steel mill deal.

When WWII started, Brazil president was very close to Italy leadership, and he was a fascist himself, Brazil was providing lots of resources to Italy and Germany.

Later, US wanted the massive amounts of rubber we had, and of course, wanted Brazil to stop helping the Axis. Then there was the sudden attacks, and a sudden president change of heart, where Brazil would start to supply US instead, specially Jeep tyres, would buy a steel mill, and would help in the African front lines... this got changed to Italy mid-trip, with Brazillian ships dumping into Italy snowy mountains people trained and geared for a desert war...

I know a bunch of people (specially, obviously, fascists, but many non-fascists too, but most of them are over 50) that still resent that story, and wish Brazil had joined (with boots on the ground) the Axis side instead.

Also Brazillian soldiers got shafted hard by the US, specially the "rubber soldiers". US and Brazil made a agreement, where drafted people could choose to fight in Europe, or get shipped to Amazon (with several promises regarding the advantage of going to Amazon, and indeed 50.000 soldiers went to Amazon), they would gather the rubber to make tyres, and US and Brazillian government would jointly pay them and take care of them, and return them back to their family after the war... The payment arrived (and partially) only in 1988, and they are still stranded away from home... (some of them still roam the forest wearing their military uniforms, kinda creepy seeing 90+ year old soldiers roaming the forest)

nl5• 13 years ago

I aren't particularly familiar with Brazilian history, but I am reasonably familiar with WW2 history.

Brazil declared war (on Germany & Italy only - not Japan) in late August 1942. That was a few months before Churchill's famous "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." speech.

This was well after Pearl Harbour and at a point where it was becoming clearer that the Axis wasn't going to win.

I've never looked into allegations of US sabotage on Brazilian merchant shipping. It's possible, but at the same time it would be very surprising if German U-boats weren't responsible for the majority of the sinkings. There's reasonable evidence that U-507 sunk at least 7 Brazilian ships (the German's were pretty good at keeping records of these things)[1].

It sounds to me like Brazil jumped in on the winning side after being on a wrong side of some bad decisions by some German U-boat commanders.

As an aside, it's fine to criticise the US, but I think it's reasonable to expect some evidence to backup some pretty big allegations. Additionally it's hard to make a moral argument that any country should have joined the Axis Powers during WW2 (with the exception of Finland, who made the best of a bad situation but were pretty much screwed no matter what they did).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-507#3rd_patrol

jgg2• 13 years ago

Then US citizens wonder why everyone else hates them.

I do wonder why people from countries with corrupt governments that commit terrible atrocities that they have no control over hate me because I come from a country whose government commits terrible atrocities that I have no control over, yes.

graycat• 13 years ago

Of course. The joke is that Cheney's statement that there is "no doubt" that Saddam has WMDs because we still had the receipts from when we sent him the chemical weapons for him to use against Iran.

javajosh4• 13 years ago

The USG has slowly, by steps, become brutal, unprincipled, and indifferent to the suffering of civilians--it's own civilians not excepted. Loyalty to the chain of command is the only value that matters (that's why the USG hates Snowden so much, BTW). Our leadership (both business and political) has woken up to the startling truth that there is no check on their power, and restraint is for losers. As governor Christie pointed out so eloquently, it's not about principles, it's about winning.

The brutality is expressed in different ways to different people. At home, the bureaucracy is brutal, the police are brutal, and the justice system is brutal - the law is applied unequally (when it is applied at all) to those with money and power. Abroad, we undermine legitimate governments, invade countries illegally, assassinate people with drones, we torture, detain people indefinitely, commit war crimes - all with impunity from our own people, even after the atrocity has been exposed and there are no doubts about the facts involved. We vote for new leaders - and the new leaders continue the same practices and grant immunity to their predecessors.

Relatively small incidents like Miranda's detention or that guy who wrote the incredible "Don't Fly on Ramadan" piece show how brutal, unprincipled, and indifferent to suffering our governments have become - and now it's totally out in the open. There are too many examples to cite: police mistakenly raid homes by mistake, shooting dogs and then leaving empty handed but telling the terrorized home-owners "you're lucky we didn't arrest you"; women being groped by deputies who are ignored by the family court judge when she tries to get protection; Cameron Ortiz and Aron Swartz; Manning, etc. Of course, terrible things happen. But in each of these cases no-one up the line thought there was a problem. Any corrective action has to be forced by overwhelming public sentiment - and even then the powerful know that time is on their side.

It's time we start asking ourselves whether or not we feel like there are sufficient safeguards in place to protect us against wide-spread abuse at the hands of our government. It's time we ask ourselves if there's really anyone who has any sense of urgency to address the ever growing problem of brutal, unprincipled, and indifferent application of power in the US. Is democracy enough? Is democracy of the type that we have, dominated by a manipulative, effective, money-driven two-party machine, giving us the candidates that we want?

Why aren't people at every level of government getting fighting mad when these stories come out, and who take immediate, decisive corrective action to make sure that a) the people responsible are not only terminated immediately, but criminally charged, and b) make sure it doesn't happen again? Why aren't people at every level of government so afraid to admit mistakes, apologize for wrong-doing, and ashamed at the lack of restraint, the lack of compassion, and the lack of principled action shown by their people? Where do we find these candidates?

icecreampain• 13 years ago

The answer to all of your questions is: money.

Those at the bottom are making enough to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

Those at the top are making tons and tons of it off power: oil deals, stocks, lobbying/corruption, etc.

Those at the bottom don't make a fuss because they don't want to become homeless.

Those at the top don't make a fuss because they don't want to die: if the powers that be are powerful enough to invade foreign countries, grab the president, hang him on live TV and then lie to the rest of the world about how he was keeping the country back while at the same time the country regresses back into the stone age (Libya, Egypt, Iran, Iraq) - what chance have you to keep your own head if you were to start blabbing about how things are unfair?

It's all about money.

chongli2• 13 years ago

But that doesn't really answer anything, does it? Blaming money (which is just an instrument of exchange) is not a useful starting point for any reform. Likewise with going further up the chain and blaming greed (or any other facet of human nature).

The only reliable tools for effecting change in society are: education/information, policy/law and enforcement.

nl5• 13 years ago

I don't diagree with what you are saying (check my comment history and you'll see some similar sentiments).

However...

I don't think you should try and combine this incident into the narrative surrounding the erosion of rights in the US.

There is very little in common here, except perhaps something like "powerful countries do some shitty things".

If you do want to combine them, then I think you need to explain how things are worse now than when the US did things like the deliberate infection of native Americans with smallpox etc.

I think the truth is that things are different now. It is much more difficult for the US to let a dictator get away with things like using chemical weapons because of the rapid dissemination of information from people on the ground. At the same time the volume of bad news make it difficult to create action on the US on any single issue.

javajosh4• 13 years ago

My initial post made the connection more explicit. I wrote something like, "At least Reagan had the good grace to keep his complicity using chemical weapons a secret." And then I couldn't believe I had just written that sentence.

That's how things are worse. We've done despicable things in the past, but we had shame enough to deny it, shame enough to try to edit history to hide it. Nowadays a video is released showing Apache pilots laughing while they kill unarmed civilians, and the USG from top to bottom has the temerity not only to ignore the war crime, but to attack the guy who released the video for being a traitor. And people don't riot. That's new. That's worse.

Nowadays men of conscience reveal secret plots that undermine our most basic freedoms. And rather than showing shame, contrition, rather than being apologetic, Obama "welcomes the debate" about privacy, and prosecutes the whistleblower with a ferocity unmatched in living memory. Christ, Obama had a foreign presidents plane grounded on the suspicion he might get his man.

It's worse because the brutality, the cold indifference to principle, the naked self-serving agenda, is entirely unmasked now. It's worse because people can't do anything. The myth that "public sentiment" matters at all in a democracy has finally been busted.

DominikR• 13 years ago

"I think the truth is that things are different now. It is much more difficult for the US to let a dictator get away with things like using chemical weapons because of the rapid dissemination of information from people on the ground."

I am not so sure that we wont read in 20 years that the gassing of civilians in Syria was done by the opposition forces with logistical and tactical support of the US to legitimate another US war.

coldtea2• 13 years ago

If you do want to combine them, then I think you need to explain how things are worse now than when the US did things like the deliberate infection of native Americans with smallpox etc. I think the truth is that things are different now

Thinking that things are worse now, helps you to want to change it.

Thinking it's same old-same old, is just a defeatist, "nothing ever changes" attitude.

I think the truth is that things are different now. It is much more difficult for the US to let a dictator get away with things like using chemical weapons because of the rapid dissemination of information from people on the ground.

Actually in this case it's the opposite. The "rapid dissemination" can be manipulated, and events can be fabricated or done covertly by agents working for the other side. Not to mention, any agent or partisan with a phone can write his "information" as "a man on the ground".

Case in point, the current situation -- where it makes no sense at all for the (winning at the time) Assad to use that stuff, but it's a very good ploy to get sympathy and support for the other side. People spoon fed by mass and social media, will learn about it 20-30 years afterwards and be "surprised", but it kinda obvious to European observers.

saraid2165• 13 years ago

Where do we find these candidates?

Why not you? Sure, you don't have the money. Go and get it. Tell HNers to put their money where their mouth is, get yourself elected, and do right.

efdee• 13 years ago

The bipartisan system has done it's damn best to ensure this will never happen.

javajosh4• 13 years ago

Thanks. But I believe that it would be more beneficial to de-gamify politics than to get elected to any particular position. One person can only do so much. The ideal situation would be to reboot the entire government, elect new people in every position, all at once. I think it's possible, actually. But it would take a ground swell movement. I've shared the idea on how to do this with some friends, and they like the idea, but it's not quite ready for public consumption. If you like I might write about it here.

It's not just about elections. Hackers have a much bigger role to play in modern civics, in my opinion, than they currently have. We need to be writing open-source software platforms for city, state and even federal governments and putting them on github. It's time for software to eat the bureaucracy. We need to have software that's ready to use, free, and with all the features we, as technologically enlightened citizens, know that it needs. Good technology would lessen the leverage bureaucrats wield over elected officials, because it would make them easier to hold accountable and to replace.

(We could write open-source banking platforms too, while we're at it. The software could have a "transparency slider" that banks could set according to their whim. But more importantly, it would reduce the barrier to entry for new, small banks to arise and compete with the incumbents.)

There is one policy change I think is very important: put limits on the complexity of law, and end what I call "The Tyranny of Complexity" (a take on Mill's "Tyranny of the Majority"). Complexity lies at the heart of many of our political and societal ills, perhaps most directly expressed as the brutality of our justice system, a system that punishes you for years whether or not you are found guilty. But complexity is also the enemy of transparency, which hurts accountability and prevents the voting public from being informed. One simple measure, at the federal level, would be to put a hard upper-bound on the size of the United States Code - and require all new bills to be written out in longhand by the congressperson proposing the bill. The law of the land is too important to delegate the writing of them to underlings. Our laws should be short, to the point, and meaningful - and writing them out, pen on paper, helps to ensure that. Word-processing and hired help have made our body of law so unwieldy and impossible to comply with that hardly any law makers read the bills that they vote on. A similar rule can and should be instituted on the state and local level.

x0x0• 13 years ago

the question is are we more or less brutal than we used to be? Remember the good old days -- you know, when Reagan authorized crack sales in LA to finance war crimes after congress explicitly banned any money going to the contras?

pcvarmint• 13 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UEpQOecmbo

Seems more real today than ever.

aaronbrethorst3• 13 years ago

As governor Christie pointed out so eloquently, it's not about principles, it's about winning.

This is, of course, the same Chris Christie who has recently abandoned his own purported principles in order to court his party's base in preparation for a run at the presidency in 2016. He's also wasting millions of taxpayers' dollars in order to hold a special election a few weeks before the general this November in order to ensure that his reelection bid is as successful as possible.

jgg2• 13 years ago

None of this is new. Manipulating and controlling the Internet is, and is a scary new precedent, and I still stand by my statement that it is really a bad thing. With everyone jacked in all the time, manipulating the masses is a thousand times easier than before.

But as for the slowly becoming brutal and unethical? Nah. They've done that for a while. A recent example of this is the Cold War: they fed radioactive oatmeal to mentally-retarded to children to "test its effects" (http://tech.mit.edu/V114/N28/fernald.28n.html), supported brutal tinpot South American dictators to "fight communism" (http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20000919/) and abused this giant list of people who we thought were Communist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_Co...).

Notice how the actions and methodology are the same (replace "communist" with "terrorist"). Notice how the reasoning is the exact same. Notice how it all starts with "wanting to protect you" from a threat most feel is real, and does exist to some extent.

The people in the government are humans like anyone else. Some people really can't grasp the idea that those people might actually be abusing you or lying to you. If and when they figure it out, they have a small revolution, become heroes, write a book, and then forget about the past and the victims and keep on rolling.

Maybe if we'd all stop have "reasonable" discussions about how people who say, "HEY GUYS, THIS PATRIOT ACT THING IS A REALLY BAD IDEA" are crackpots or paranoid when it's happening, we'd have more of a chance of stopping this...but probably not.

Systems run by people are created and exist to protect us from the nature of people.

lukifer3• 13 years ago

It shouldn't be surprising that the historical shift from violence to public opinion incentivizes propaganda, just as capitalism incentivizes advertising. And any country where the propaganda isn't working? No problem: ship them some viol... er, democracy!

b1daly• 13 years ago

I think the OP shows the opposite of your thesis, that the USG is getting worse. As much as I agree that the USG is doing bad things now, it seems clear that in any historical context things have gotten better overall. We now have lawyers involved in picking the targets of drone strikes. Contrast that with the large scale bombing of civilians in countless wars in the 20th century, and I think things, in regards to the behavior of a powerful state like the US, have improved a lot.

I find some irony in the complaining about all the spying the USG is involved in. I much prefer that they do that than go to war. The various intelligence agencies in the US got a lot of (political) grief for not stopping the 9/11 bombers, and whether it is actually helpful or not, it is understandable that there would be an institutional response to step up "intelligence" activities.

In terms of whether the USG has become more brutal and unprincipled to the suffering of our own civilians, I see no evidence of this. A simple look at the treatment of blacks and Native Americans throughout the history of the US shows this sentiment to be a false idealization of the past.

That said, I am certainly appalled by many of the current scandals. I'm just not quite as appalled as I am by the outrageous actions of the USG throughout its history.

The reason I think this matters is that the US is a complex and powerful nation. To effect positive change requires at least a roughly accurate view of the various trends, and the forces driving them.

I think you don't see the outrage because most people don't get outraged until they start to see significant, ongoing, systemic negative effects on themselves or those close to them.

For example, the injustice of the Jim Crow laws was so massive, and had a direct negative effect on African Americans, that there was a substantial number of highly motived citizens from which to build a movement.

Another example was the Vietnam War protests in the US, which were given huge fuel by the fact that a civilian draft was pulling so many US citizens directly into the war against their own wishes.

The negative consequences of the NSA spying on US citizens are nowhere near these examples.

I also happen to think that the NSA has been spying on whoever it can for a long time. The scale has just gotten much bigger because of the internet. The modest outrage we are seeing is a positive sign.

lukifer3• 13 years ago

No matter how much power We The People imbue in our representatives, even when they perfectly reflect the will of their constituents, inevitably there are intangible powers that overwhelm them: old boy networks, corporate benefactors, "special interests", etc. There are simply too many parties who benefit from existing abuses of power, with an opposing party that will seize the slightest PR advantage mercilessly, and media networks that require their millions in kickbacks in order to legitimize you, making it unwise to upset your donors.

On the one hand, we need democratic processes to peacefully resolve unresolvable conflicts: to find workable middle grounds on issues of disagreement. But on the other, we also need collective solidarity in preserving the system as a whole: law and order, transparency, corruption, etc. We got so good at competitive democracy as a culture (due in no small part to First Past The Post), that we've forgotten how to engage in the cooperative democracy that allowed a Constitution to be drafted in the first place, despite all the vehement disagreements at the time.

Sometimes I can't help but wonder if an adversarial political system is doomed to failure, and if we wouldn't be better off if anyone would wanted to participate in the political process was able, at least in some capacity.

theboywho• 13 years ago

What is it with all these leaks? Are people following Snowden or is the US gov following the British Gov and leaking info about itself?

BruceM• 13 years ago

Look at the PDFs on the final page of the article. They each have a date for when they were released.

nl5• 13 years ago

Historical context is always needed when one looks at something like this:

The US relationship with Iraq & Iran was very complex.

In 1979 the Iranian revolution occurred, which humiliated the US.

In 1982 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan (which borders Iran). That was significant because it let the USSR threaten US oil interests in the Persian Gulf, and put the USSR one step closer to getting a sea port in the Arabian Sea and/or Indian Ocean.

Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein was continuing to threaten the US's ally Israel but was also smart enough to play the US off against the USSR.

Hussein was very worried about Iran because of the large number of Shia Moslems in Iraq.

When Iraq invaded Iran the US expected Iraq to win quickly, because the Iranians had very few advanced weapons. The US certainly didn't want Iran to win, but nor did they want Iraq to become more powerful in the region.

So the US (with Israeli help) began arming Iran (on a small scale). This is known as the Iran/Contra affair.

Thing went Iraq's way for a while, but eventually the Iranians began to push them back using "human wave attacks".

At this point the US began to fear that Iraq would actually lose, so they started giving Hussein financial and military support.

This is when the Iraqis resorted to gas: (unsurprisingly) they found it was very effective at breaking up the Iranian infantry charges.

There's little doubt that the US knew this would happen.

The interesting thing is that the fact Hussein used gas put a new perspective on the Israeli bombing of the Iraqi nuclear program (in 1981, towards the start of the Iran/Iraq war). While that was condemned at the time, when the knowledge of gas attacks became wide spread few people doubted that Hussein would have used a nuclear bomb as well if he had access to one.

Anyway.. a long history lesson.

I guess my question is "What should the US have done"?

jacquesm7• 13 years ago

It goes much further back than that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Mossadeq

And if you want you can go back all the way to the 1920's.

What the US and the UK should have done is to let the Iranians govern their own country when it mattered.

So much for exporting democracy.

Create• 13 years ago

Be more like postwar (West) Germany,

nl5• 13 years ago

Err? Downvotes?

I agree the story goes back further, but I can't write all of Wikipedia. I think what I wrote is a reasonably factual account that supplies reasonable context.

jacquesm7• 13 years ago

Agreed. silly downvotes.

Thanks for the summary! I do think that the Mossadeq affair should have been an integral part of the whole.

frank_boyd• 13 years ago

If you combine these ethical standards with the total surveillance network the government has set up with the "Five Eyes" partners [0], you know what's coming.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement

CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran

Related Stories